Metal Gear Solid 4: Ultra Video Coverage

As many of you know, Kikizo's E3 video coverage is a little bit different to what you'll find elsewhere. Rather than scrambling to post everything first, we bring a technical quality and broadness of coverage, combined with unique material not found anywhere else, in one massive blowout that other videogame locations can really only dream of. This year however we're dooing things a little differently, as we decided to kick off early with these videos for Metal Gear Solid 4.

On the Monday of E3 week, Sony debuted a cut-down version of the new MGS4 trailer, lasting over three minutes. We have that below in direct feed 480p and smaller alternative versions.

On Tuesday, Konami showed the stunning, 15-minute extended version of the trailer - the best MGS trailer ever in the humble opinion of Kikizo staff - at its pre-show conference Downtown. We have that below too in a mega 512MB download, 480p at sixty frames per second with direct feed audio, probably the best version of the entire trailer you will find anywhere right now. (Note to Konami staff, this was not taken from the conference). There's a smaller version of that, too.

And just for good measure there's also a lower quality direct feed of the extended trailer so you have the best of everything.

The trailer is essential viewing. The best thing about it is it's almost guaranteed to be realtime on final PS3 hardware, because of the believably varying framerate. For the most part the trailer was performing at around 24fps, giving a film-like quality, although at times it would briefly wrestle back up to 60fps, which is why our high quality versions here are offered at 60fps, so you can see it with the exact same smoothness we did. Hopefully we'll get 720p at some stage soon.

As was alluded to at the start of Konami's briefing, "if you thought what you saw yesterday [at the Sony conference] was impressive, just wait until you see this". In our opinion the extended MGS4 trailer is the best MGS trailer ever, surpassing any of the already-outstanding trailers for MGS2 or the surprise hit jungle-based trailers in Snake Eater in terms of style, structure and emotion.

Almost a short film in its own right, it does take a few viewings for the impact to hit home and the trailer's intentions to settle in, but then you're left with perhaps the most stunning videogame trailer ever - certainly a massive step up from - and double the length of - the game's debut TGS trailer last September. What we also liked about the trailer was that it was clearly a genuine realtime display of PS3 graphics, with a framerate floating at around the 24fps "film-like" mark for the most part, occasionally slowing a little during bust scenes or scenes with complex physics, and sometimes increasing to an obvious 60fps in close-ups or enclosed scenes.

With the sheer quality of visual detail and intense artistry of environment design on display here, the frame rate is an acceptable compromise when compared to the rock-solid 60fps "build" that was used for the TSG trailer, and to be honest it was just nice to see what MGS4 looks like in genuine realtime for PS3. The trailer has to be watched to be believed [update: see below for exclusively the best quality versions of the extended trailer anywhere] and is without question the killer app for PS3's "some point after launch" line-up.

Kojima-san himself is not 100% committed to a 2007 launch date, although the trailer does sardonically indicate that the game will release in 2007, with "2008" scratched out and replaced with "2007" at the end of the trailer. The end sequence of the extended trailer, showing Raiden battle several of the mech-like military bots with his katana and announce, "Snake, it's my turn to protect you", combined with the eye-openingly convincing, tear-wiping emotions displayed by Otacon, and the already infamous Snake moment debuted in yesterday's short trailer - this is moving stuff proving that the new generation of consoles, when used with the attention to detail of creators like Kojima, can move users in ways that last generation's "emotion engine" could never have imagined. And with that, Konami's conference ended on the highest note possible.

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We've even fixed audio problems you may have experienced elsewhere - simply BECAUSE WE CARE. This is just the beginning of our superlative video blowout, so expect tonnes more exclusive, unique and high-quality video coverage to appear shortly. Forget TV and DVDs - the web is the only place for coverage of this quality, and Kikizo is the place that takes advantage of it.

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